Karma

Ritual action and the Upanishads

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the Upanishads says that karma emerges from a ritual context, in which the word refers to any ritual action that yields beneficial results if performed correctly and negative ones if performed incorrectly. A 2023 historical survey in the journal Religions adds that neither the Vedas nor the Brahmanas contain the belief in a developed form, as found in the Upanishads, and notes that some scholars hold that the Jains were the first to introduce the idea.

The Upanishad article dates the first-period texts, including the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya, to roughly 700 to 500 BCE. It says they contain no explicit theory of karma but extend the notion beyond ritual to moral retribution and causality. In the Brihadaranyaka the sage Yajnavalkya teaches that present actions have future consequences, without indicating that the future is fully determined, and the Chandogya links conduct to the kind of birth a person can expect.

Buddhist and Jain formulations

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Jain philosophy describes Mahavira as a teacher of the sixth century BCE and a contemporary of the Buddha, whose doctrines were formulated in reaction to the Brahmanism then taking shape. In Buddhist scripture, a discourse in the Anguttara Nikaya translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu has the Buddha say that intention is kamma, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Indian Buddhist ethics reports that the karma an action generates is said to depend strongly on the motivation behind it.

Arrival in Western culture

A 2011 editorial introduction in the journal Literature and Aesthetics credits the Theosophical Society, as discussed by one of the contributors, with familiarizing the West with now-everyday concepts including karma, reincarnation and meditation. A psychology paper describes karma-like beliefs as appearing in spiritual and New Age movements in the West, and a 2023 article calls the popular Western version a simplified one compared with the richer meaning the concept has in Indian-origin religions. The sources reviewed give no detailed chronology of how the word entered everyday English.

The word and its range

Karma is a Sanskrit word for action, and the Pali form kamma appears in Buddhist texts. The Upanishad article traces its sense of effective ritual action to Vedic practice, and the Buddhist discourse cited here equates kamma with intention, expressed through body, speech and mind. In popular English the word usually names the supposed consequence of a deed instead of the deed itself, a shift that the sources reviewed describe but do not date.

Related and confusable terms

A philosophical analysis argues that karma and rebirth are logically distinct, so that karma does not imply rebirth and rebirth does not imply karma, even though classical Indian literature usually pairs them. Merit (punya) and demerit are the accounting terms of the doctrine, and transfer of merit is a practice, found in several traditions, of directing accumulated merit to another being. Psychologists distinguish belief in karma from belief in a just world and from belief in a moralizing God, because karma can operate without a god and across lifetimes.

Karma is also not the same as fate. The translator of a Pali discourse on the topic writes that the Buddha's teaching on kamma avoids determinism, and the Upanishad article says the Brihadaranyaka teaching leaves the future open. The sources reviewed do not define phrases such as karmic debt or karmic relationship, which are used in popular and New Age speech, so this page does not describe their meaning.

In Hindu thought and practice

A 2023 survey reports that the Bhagavad Gita describes three paths to liberation from the cycle of birth and death: the way of works, the way of knowledge and the way of devotion. Adherents are described as seeking merit through sacrifices, gifts, vows, penance and pilgrimage, and some texts call expiation a medicine for bad karma. The same survey says the philosopher Shankara held that karma cannot be transferred, while the Puranas disagree with one another about transfer of merit.

In Buddhist and Jain teaching

The Stanford entry says that in a traditional Buddhist view actions intended to harm others evolve into misery for the agent and actions intended to benefit others into happiness, and that the Buddha opposed animal sacrifice as producing bad karma. A historical survey states that the Pali canon stresses the personal nature of karma, while Mahayana practice commonly dedicates merit to others, although the survey says Theravada practice in South Asia also recognizes the transfer of merit.

In Jain philosophy, as summarized in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, karma is a kind of matter that accumulates through action and draws the soul back into a body. Because of this, all karma, good and bad, leads to rebirth, and Jain ethics aims at purging accumulated karma and ceasing to accumulate more. Jains, Buddhists and Hindus all hold that good karma leads to better circumstances in the next life, and the article ties the central ethical rule of nonviolence to this view.

In Western popular and New Age speech

A 2023 article describes the popular Western idea as the belief that people get what they deserve from their actions and intentions, sometimes invoked with a twinkle in the eye and more often to explain setbacks than successes. Psychology research notes that many agnostic Westerners are willing to attribute outcomes to karma without belonging to a tradition that teaches it. Past Life Regression and Ancestral Healing, which also draw on ideas of carried-over consequences, have their own pages on this site.

Explaining fortune and giving meaning to suffering

A philosopher analyzing why the belief persists argues that it is attractive for two reasons: it expresses the moral ideal of receiving just deserts, and, together with rebirth, it offers consolation that one's fate is set by moral quality and not by chance. A 2025 interview study of 24 caregivers of people with serious mental illness in India found that participants who identified as Hindu or Buddhist mostly attributed suffering to karma, and the authors note that this can facilitate acceptance of an illness as beyond one's control.

Ethical orientation

Within Buddhist ethics, adherents describe the law of karma as aligning self-interest with the welfare of others, since harmful intent is said to return as misery and benevolent intent as happiness. In the Jain tradition the same logic is tied to nonviolence. These are statements of what the traditions teach and are not findings about behavior.

Measuring belief in karma

A 2019 psychology paper reported three studies with a combined 8,996 participants from Canada, India and the United States. Belief in karma, measured by self-report, was associated with but not reducible to belief in a just world, belief in a moralizing God, religious participation and cultural context, and it uniquely predicted causal attributions for misfortune that follows bad behavior. The data are cross-sectional questionnaires, so they describe beliefs and not any effect of karma itself.

A 2021 paper in Cognitive Science used two studies, one of 2,006 mostly Christian Canadians and mostly Hindu Indians and one of 1,752 mostly Christian Americans and Singaporean Buddhists. It reported that intuitive thinking, mentalizing, dualism and teleological thinking predicted a variety of karma beliefs beyond cultural learning, and that karma beliefs were present at low levels in Western samples. The repository copy read for this page is an accepted manuscript.

Karma, blame and generosity

In a preregistered experiment with 831 participants from India, Singapore and the United States, thinking about karma was followed by ratings of ostensibly innocent victims as having more negative traits, and belief in karma indirectly predicted negative evaluations through a greater perception that victims were personally responsible. A later set of three preregistered studies with 6,049 participants found that belief in karmic causality predicted system-justifying beliefs that legitimate inequality, while reminders of karma increased generosity only toward recipients whose need was not their own fault. Both papers were read through repository abstracts only.

Karma beliefs and health

A 2008 study interviewed 264 Sri Lankan tsunami survivors about six months after the 2004 disaster. After adjustment for relevant factors, belief in karma was associated with poorer health, and a pessimistic explanatory style was associated with both poor health and post-traumatic stress disorder. The abstract describes an association and does not establish that the belief caused the poorer health. Only the abstract was available for this page.

What has not been tested

No source reviewed reports a controlled test of whether karma operates as a metaphysical cause, and a psychology paper itself describes the link between actions and karmic outcomes as often causally opaque and spread over supernaturally long timescales. Searches of PubMed for belief in karma and for karma in titles, and web searches on the psychology of karma belief and on karma and illness stigma, returned studies of the belief and its correlates, not tests of its truth. The searches were not exhaustive, and the interpretation of any such test would depend on the tradition.

Determinism and the Buddhist reply

In the Sivaka Sutta, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, the Buddha rejects the view that whatever a person feels is entirely caused by past action and lists other causes of feeling, including bile, phlegm, wind, the seasons and harsh treatment, with the result of kamma as one among them. The translator's note adds that the teaching avoids determinism. This is a reading within the Theravada tradition, and other traditions and teachers interpret karma differently.

Doctrinal tensions and social critique

The 2023 philosophical analysis argues that two motives behind the belief, strict retributive justice and improvement of one's moral standing through merit transfer, are both psychologically powerful but of debatable compatibility. The Upanishad article records a Chandogya passage that links birth into particular social classes, or into animal and outcaste wombs, to prior conduct, and the 2025 experiments found that belief in karma predicted system-justifying beliefs. The sources reviewed do not set out the history of critiques of caste in relation to karma.

Blame and stigma

The experimental findings reported above suggest that karma-based explanations can increase blame of people who suffer misfortune. In the 2025 interview study in India, religious models of mental illness, which included karma and other explanations, often led to fears of stigma that prevented caregivers from seeking support or healthcare, and one participant described a relative receiving religious treatment before a psychiatrist was consulted. The study is small, qualitative and not specific to karma alone.

Distress and the limits of the evidence

The Sri Lankan survivor study linked belief in karma with poorer self-reported health, but the abstract does not show direction or cause. The sources reviewed contain no reports of coercive relationships, financial exploitation or spiritual abuse tied to karma, and no clinical guideline or professional-body statement on karma-based counseling, and this absence reflects the limits of the search and not proof that such harms do not occur.

Interpreting an illness or injury as karmic payback does not replace medical or mental health assessment, and the research above shows how such interpretations can accompany blame, concealment and delayed care. A person concerned about a health problem, or in distress, can consult a qualified clinician, and in an emergency should contact local emergency services.